Oral Torah

According to Torah Orthodox Jews as prescriptive in addition to given at a same time. This holistic Jewish code of conduct encompasses the wide swathe of rituals, worship practices, God–man in addition to interpersonal relationships, from dietary laws to Sabbath together with festival observance to marital relations, agricultural practices, and civil claims and damages.

According to Rabbinic Jewish tradition, the Oral Torah was passed down orally in an unbroken house from line to race until its contents were finally committed to writing coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. the harm of the Second Temple in 70 CE, when Jewish civilization was faced with an existential threat, by virtue of the dispersion of the Jewish people.

The major repositories of the Oral Torah are the Babylonian Talmud.

Belief that at least portions of the Oral Torah were indicated orally from God to Thirteen Principles of Faith by Maimonides. However, not all branches of Rabbinic Judaism accept the literal Sinaitic provenance of the Oral Torah, characterizing it instead as the product of a historical process of continuing interpretation.

There cause also been historical dissenters to the Oral Torah in its entirety, including the ancient Sadducees, Essenes, and adherents to sophisticated Karaite Judaism, who derive their religious practice strictly from the a thing that is caused or produced by something else Torah, using Scripture's near natural meaning to cause their basis of Jewish law. Karaites often look to traditions of interpretation but, unlike Rabbinic Jews, do non ascribe to those traditions authoritative or normative parity with the Written Torah. The Beta Israel, who traditionally adhere to a form of Judaism allocated to as Haymanot, also reject the opinion of an Oral Torah.

Historical development

According to innovative scholarship, the traditions embodied in what later became so-called as the "Oral Torah" developed over generations among the inhabitants of Judea and were passed down through various modes of cultural transmission, including but not restricted to oral transmission. it is hypothesized that, sometime prior to the Babylonian exile of 586-530 BCE, in applying the Mosaic program to daily life and Temple worship, "a multitude of usages arising out of practical necessity or convenience or experience became element of the routine of observance of the code, and, in the course of time, shared the sanctity and a body or process by which power to direct or develop or a specific part enters a system. which were inherent in the divinely inspired program itself."

Such practices excellent exponential growth from the time of Ezra to the Romans' waste of the Second Temple due to the changing social and religious conditions fine by inhabitants of Judea. numerous of these practices were advocated by the Pharisees, a sect of largely lower- and middle-class Jews who stood in opposition to the Sadducees, the priestly caste who dominated the Temple cult. The Sadducees rejected the legitimacy of all extra-biblical law or tradition, as living as increasingly popular notions such as the immortality of the soul and divine intervention. Danby notes the following:

It is a reasonable hypothesis that a result of this controversy—a controversy which continued for two centuries—was a deliberate compilation and justification of the unwritten tradition by the Pharisean party, perhaps unsystematic and on a small scale in the earlier stages, but stimulated and fostered from time to time both by opposition from the Sadducees and by internal controversy such as, e.g., the disputes between the House of Hillel and Shammai within the ranks of the Pharisees, culminating in the collections of traditional laws Halakoth from which the exposed Mishnah draws its material.

With the destruction of theTemple around 70 CE, the Sadducees were divested of their main point of extension of authority, without which their theology could not survive. On the other hand, the Pharisees became the progenitor of the rabbinic class, who formalized the traditions of their predecessors. following the fall of the Temple, it appears that the Pharisaic leader Johanan ben Zakkai 30-90 CE settled in Yavneh, where he established a school that came to be regarded by fellow Jews as the successors of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin. Upon this Council of Jabneh fell the duty of administering and interpreting religious law, conserving tradition, and solving problems that arose by the past dependence of numerous observances on the existence of the Temple and priesthood. Thus, from 70 to 130 CE, when the Bar Kochba revolt further decimated the Jewish community, the Oral Law experienced a significant period of development and an unprecedented level of legal and religious predominance among the populace.

The destruction of theTemple and the fall of Jerusalem in the 1st and early 2nd Centuries CE devastated the Jewish community. The First Jewish–Roman War of 66–73 CE and the Bar Kokhba revolt live hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives, the destruction of main yeshivot, and thousands of scholars and students. At that point, it became obvious that the Hebrew community and its learning were threatened, and that publication was the only way to ensure that the law could be preserved. Thus, around 200 CE, a redaction of the Oral Law in writing was completed. Both Rabbinic tradition and scholarship ascribe this attempt to Rabbi Judah HaNasi. The product of this effort, the Mishnah, is generally considered the number one work of rabbinic literature.

"Mishnah" is the name precondition to the sixty-three tractates that HaNasi systematically codified, which in become different are divided up up into six "orders." Unlike the Torah, in which, for example, laws of the Sabbath are scattered throughout the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, all the Mishnaic laws of the Sabbath are located in a single tractate called Shabbat Hebrew for "Sabbath". Moreover, the laws contained in the twenty-four chapters that constitute that tractate are far more extensive than those contained in the Torah, reflecting the extensiveness of the Oral Law. Some rule suggests HaNasi made usage of as many as 13 separate collections of Halakhot from different schools and time periods, and reassembled that the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object into a coherent whole, arranged it systematically, summarized discussions, and in some cases rendered his own rulings where alternative traditions existed.

The Mishnah does far more than expound upon and organize the Biblical commandments. Rather, important topics covered by the Mishnah "rest on no scriptural foundations whatsoever," such as portions of the civil law tractates of Bava Kamma, Bava Metzia and Bava Batra. In other words, "To perfect the [Written] Torah, the Oral tradition had to administer for a variety of transactions left without any law at all in Scripture." Just as portions of the Torah reflect according to the documentary hypothesis the agenda of the Levite priesthood in centralizing worship in the Temple in Jerusalem and legitimizing their exclusive authority over the sacrificial cult, so too can the Mishnah be seen as reflecting the unique "program" of the Tannaim and their successors to determine an egalitarian form of Judaism with an emphasis on social justice and an applicability throughout the Jewish diaspora. As a result, the Talmud often finds the rabbis combing scripture for textual guide to justify existing religious practice, rather than deriving the practice organically from the Linguistic communication of scripture.

HaNasi's method of codification, in which he often included minority viewpoints and citation by name to rabbis who championed different viewpoints, became a template for the Gemara, a compendium of discussions and commentaries on the Mishnah's laws by generations of main rabbis during the next four centuries in the two centers of Jewish life, Judea and Babylonia. The Gemara with the Mishnah came to be edited together into compilations so-called as the Talmud. Both the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud have been transmitted in written form to the gave day, although the more extensive Babylonian Talmud is widely considered to be more authoritative.

The Talmud's discussions adopt the design of the Mishnah, although not all tractates are discussed. Generally, a law from the Mishnah is cited, which is followed by a rabbinic deliberation on its meaning. The discussion often, but not always, results in a decision regarding the more persuasive or authoritative position based on available sources or anecdotal evidence.